With her sensitive sympathy, Mrs. Stowe probably knew that Lincoln’s mind was dwelling upon his own painful loss in the death of his dear young son the spring before; and she, for her part, was reminded of the day when, as she stood by the grave of the most beautiful and most beloved of her seven children, she learned the woe a slave mother feels when her child is torn away from her. She thought also of the crushing sorrow that came to her at Andover in the loss by drowning of her first-born son, Henry Ellis. Perhaps in this hour of quiet, intimate conversation she was able, in order to give comfort to the man before her, to speak of these things, for it is by showing to those in deep suffering that we suffer with them that we comfort them most. And then perhaps she told the President that she, too, had a son at Washington, and saw the smile that she remembered so well all her life afterwards, light up that homely-beautiful face as he said, “One of the twenty thousand encamped about the city?” and she answered that he was one of that vast company and that he had been made lieutenant for honorable service on several battlefields. And then she no doubt told how he was one of the first to volunteer when the First Massachusetts Infantry was formed. He had been a student of medicine under Dr. Holmes, who had tried to persuade him not to become a soldier, but to finish his studies and then go into the army as a surgeon. The boy would not hear of this; he threw his hat on the floor and cried, “I could not look my fellowmen in the face if I did not enlist. People shall never say that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son is a coward!” And if in telling this she took a motherly pride, who shall blame her? With this the interview ended. Mrs. Stowe was rejoined by her son and daughter, and the guests took their departure. That evening Mrs. Stowe wrote the greater part of her “Reply,” and it was soon on its way to Great Britain.